Armed only with a bucket full of enthusiasm, a wiki full of miss-information and a 2 digit IQ, the good Captain seeks not only to understand the modern world, but also fix one or two bits of kit along the way.

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Saturday, 1 December 2012

Clonezilla, its not really that scary!

Whether you are running Linux or Windows, its a good idea to clone your system before upgrading your system software, or doing anything that may brick your system.

Its easy to create a clone of your current system which you can then use to re-image your computer, in the event of a problem.

However, it should go without saying that re-imaging is a destructive process. The whole computer hard drive is going to be re-written when you restore an image.
For Windows users, the clone can be used only on the machine it was taken from, or another machine with exactly the same make/model motherboard. This is because Windows is installed using just the required hardware drivers for the target machine.

For Linux users, the clone can be used on just about any other computer. This is because Linux distributions normally have a wide range of hardware support included.

For MAC users, you need to do some research.

How Long Does It Take?

Well it depends on how much stuff you have on your computer drive, and the speed of the devices and interfaces that you use. As I write this, I'm cloning my media centre at a speed of 300MB/min. And as about 36GB of disk space contains files, it should take approximately 2hrs.

What You Will Need

A USB drive to save your image (the clone)

A CD or USB memory stick to create a boot-able version of Clonezilla

Now we need a copy of Clonezilla.
For Linux or Windows users, if you are happy to run Clonezilla on a CD, just go to: Clonezilla
...and download the iso for what is described as the latest stable release.

You then need to burn this onto a CD as an image (i.e. not just as a bunch of files) in order to end up with a boot-able disk.

For Linux or Windows users who would like Clonezilla on a USB stick we will use a free application called Tuxboot to create a boot-able device.

From this point on, all instructions and illustrations relate directly to Linux. But this guide should work pretty much the same for Windows, as TuxBoot is cross-platform, and Clonezilla is Linux based anyway.

Modify the suggested name to include computer id (e.g. 2012-11-30-Dell-D600)

Choose local disk as source: probably sda unless you have several disks

Skip checking/repairing

Check image: {Its your call, I'm not your mum!}

A couple more questions to agree to, then the clone starts!

Once cloning is complete, select the shutdown option "0" and allow the computer to shut down before disconnecting devices. That's all there is to it!

Restoring Your Clone

When the time comes to re-image your machine using a saved clone, the process is very similar. One important difference is that you must remember to select Restoredisk, rather than the default Savedisk.

Size Matters

You can't directly restore an image to a disk that is smaller than the original system disk. But you can usually shrink a drive (or at least shrink a disks contents into a smaller volume on a drive) using GParted.

So if you plan to roll out a Linux image to a range of machines, its best to resize with GParted before creating a clone with Clonezilla.

If you have already created a clone, you may have to restore to a suitable disk, resize with GParted, then clone from this smaller volume.